Erasing Tapes - how sweet the sound?

[Music] i was on ebay the other day for a change and i noticed the prices that people are asking for new old stock blank cassettes and they've really shot up in the last couple of years i mean they were up there already but they've just gone crazy now just to give you some examples i um i've still got some seal cassettes here i i don't tend to record things onto cassette nowadays really i'd use my cassette players as playback devices for my old cassettes but i do still have some blank cassettes and they're sealed and i've perhaps got maybe 20 or so in the house just to give you some idea one of these on ebay a fuji dr2 not particularly brilliant cassette six pound a tdk cd-ing ii these are some of the cassettes from the tail end of the cassette era again six pound the famous tdk sa-90 another six pound now this is what people are asking for them this is what i could go on today and buy one of these for there are people asking a lot more but generally around about six pound is the price i could get one of those for in the late 80s into the early 90s when i was recording onto cassette i found that tdk sa-90s gave me the best results so that's just what i tended to use i could go to my local walmarts and i'd buy a pack of three i think it was for i think it was 499 and that would last me over a month or so it wasn't a massive expense and of course i was recording stuff off the radio off hip-hop radio show that was in manchester i'd listen to that my personal stereo over the course of a week so it was like a cheap way of having music i've still got all those cassettes every single one of them because i never re-recorded over any of them once i've filled one up and then filled another one up and then i've got this library of cassettes anyway so the chrome type ii tapes pretty much six pound if you want one on ebay at the moment let's go to metal sony metal xr now this was sony's last metal cassette that was on the market i believe they stopped selling it 20 years ago and this is of course why these things are expensive but again sealed one of these nowadays if you go on ebay 22 pound for one blank sealed cassette barbie now let's go up market a little bit more they were always like posh cassettes back in the day you know ones that i would never have bought but they were for kind of connoisseurs and things so for example a metal master 46 this is sealed in its box now i only bought this a few years ago just to have it as a sort of prop in a video and i didn't pay too much then you know how much one of these is now 160 pounds now again this is what people are asking for for them i'm not saying that people are selling them at that maybe no one's buying them but that's what the prices are if you want to buy one on ebay now just give you another idea of a kind of a market metal cassette this is one that i've got that isn't sealed and this is a tdk max g90 this was one of the top of the range things with a metal case and all the rest of it again another 160 quid now let me tell you about the prices back in the day because i've got an old what hi-fi magazine here this is from may 2000 and there's an advert in here and i'll pop this up on the screen i think we can fit it over this side somewhere um so if you look down into the chrome position the tdk sa-90 back then was 68 pence in this now remember i was mentioning that i bought them for i think three for a fiver back in the late 80s early 90s in 2000 cassettes had fallen out of fashion so the prices were down there and of course this is a discount place as well but it wasn't like they were getting rid of them in this place you could buy as many as you wanted to for 68 pence a piece in fact in this what hifi magazine there's an advert from richer sounds there is and in the middle of that page it says free tape tdk sa-90 for every customer all you had to do was walk in take that voucher in and you've got an sa-90 nowadays that'll be worth six pound but yeah going down this list of other prices if we get into the the metal tape so remember i had that sony one which was um that one there the metal xr which now goes for 22 pound in here they've got it listed as 1.25 so in the year 2000 this was 1.25 now it's 22 quid now uh just to give you an idea of inflation i'm not talking about 2022 when it's gone a bit weird but uh the bank of england have got inflation calculator and you can look back as to how much a pound was worth in 2000 compared to 2021 which is the last full years they've got figures for so obviously worth a pound in 2000 i think worth a pound one pound 58 in 2021 so looking at some of these tapes they're mostly sort of around about a pound a piece at most until you get into the metal but even the metals are like a pound 25 so if you imagine uh really that should be sort of like about two quid there were days if of course it wasn't supply and demand issues taking over so yeah uh it might have been a good idea to put all your money into cassettes back in the year 2000. the only reason i mention this is if you notice nowadays if you were to want to record onto cassette uh of course all these are new old stock and the reason people are wanting to buy these is because the new cassettes that are out there most people don't really rate they think they're a bit rubbish um now as i say i'm not really recording onto cassette nowadays and i certainly haven't bought any of the new ones so i can't really comment on those there are other channels that have done reviews and i'll link to those in the video description but overall i think the consensus is new cassettes aren't as good as old cassettes and of course you can't buy new metal tapes type 4 and the type 2 that they're trying to sell you nowadays isn't as good as an old type 1. so if you want proper type 2 or type 4 tapes you've definitely got to buy old and bear in mind i mentioned that sony they stopped making it 20 years ago so it is getting old now but even if you just want you know decent type 1 you're going to get some old ones as well so that's why these are so expensive people don't really like the new tapes and the old ones diminishing them out of new old stock around there is an alternative though if you don't want to pay up for these sealed ones and you don't want to buy your new ones well how about just buying some used old cassettes i've never as i mentioned re-recording over cassettes it's not something i ever did and i was just thinking if i got some of those would there be issues with them are they going to erase all right i mean after all i've had something recorded on them perhaps for 20 30 years is it gonna come off it when i try and record over the top so i've got a few different erasing technologies here i'm going to try so first off i've got one of these i picked this up a sony be9h and the idea is this is kind of like a passive box full of magnets i think you pass your cassette through it and it's supposed to erase the cassette so should we get some old cassette send it through here and see if we can still hear anything on them and then also you might have seen these bulk tape erasers back in the day these uh things this is a radio shack one i've bought this again on ebay recently uh i think it's from the us i have to use a step down power transformer says here originally cost 19.99 so this you plug it in and it sort of zaps whatever you put it on so it could be an eight-track cartridge a reel of tape or a cassette but it says on the side here not for metal tape you see the thing with metal tape is when you recorded on those they needed a bit more um for one of a better term similarly with this it's not strong enough not powerful enough to erase a metal tape so we'll try it just on the other ones i also had that little rewinder thing from sony that we've seen before where you just pop the tape in and it rewinds it but also there's a button on there to raise it we could always try that then when we're talking about old uh portable stereo things quite a lot of them had permanent erase magnets and a lot of the new crappy ones that are out there have permanently raised magnets so a permanently raised magnet rather than an electromagnet is just a magnet that comes into contact with the tape just a normal magnet that touches the tape and pushes along before the record head and i've found that those do really noisy recordings i think that might have been the problem that i was having back in the 90s because i was recording on a boombox back then it might have had a permanent erase magnet and that's why i only use tapes once because i found that if i ever did want to re-record of them they just didn't sound as good the second time round we'll find if that's any good at erasing some of the tapes i've got and the tapes i've got well i went on ebay and i looked for some people who were selling used cassettes i've got some ag for tapes here these are proper chrome later on a lot of the type twos weren't using chrome dioxide but these are because they're from 1979 i believe now that is getting on there for a chrome tape i wonder if i'll be able to get the stuff to erase off here successfully now one of the reasons i picked these is because i thought well if i'm going to get some used tapes i want ones that look like the new in a way and these do because the chap who had these had it written on the cassettes they hadn't written on the j card there they hadn't written on the spine what they've done is they've put a little sticker on the bottom here used a dymo and put a little code on there that no doubt refer to something that they had like a book for what was on which cassette so if you look for a cassette like that it looks pretty much as good as you except it looks very out of date and then on top of that those would have been type 2 cassettes i thought i'll get some tight ones as well and i say i never really dabbled in type 1's over the years but i got some tdks tdk d90 i got like a big box of these they have written on some of the cards but what you could do with these you could always buy yourself new j cards if you want and put it on the inside or you could get new labels and put over the top of the cassette so you could just get ones that people scribbled all over if you wanted to but i always like to have a nice clean spot on their cassettes if it's all possible but the cost of those i think they worked out about 60p or something per d90 from tdk and then as far as the agfas go those worked out they weren't that good actually it was like about two pound a piece i'm sure you could get better than that if you shopped around but i just want someone to look nice and clean so there you go that's what i'm doing today playing around with some old cassettes that have stuff recorded on them and seeing if they're worth buying now of course once you've got some used cassettes with recordings on them you might want to just put them in your tape recorder and recall things as they come along but then again you probably want to have them completely blank before you start or i always do because if you press pause after a recording that starts again you might get a little bit of a snippet of what was on these previously so your choices are of course to put your cassette in your tape recorder and record it in real time on both sides to blank it off but you know that's a little bit tedious when you bought a box of cassettes which is why i wanted to have a look at some of these bulk erase methods to see if any of these are a better option but of course when using these how good are they taking those recordings off the tape well let's try and find out first off let's have a look at this thing here this be9h now i'm testing the tapes in this tcd5m and i'm going to pick one of the older tdks i remember using this particular style myself but i can see here that the chaps recorded the police on this so of course i can't play too much of it but let's just have a listen i've got to say these recordings are terrible now obviously it doesn't matter i was just concerned that the tapes might be somehow damaged because they just sounded so awful but the tapes look fine they don't seem to be shedding anything they're not creased let's try and erase them with a sony be9h and then we'll play them back in this and see if we can hear anything on them after we've erased them or supposedly erase them right well i haven't looked at this before please read the instruction manual and luckily we've got one so i can figure out how it works and as you can see there it's sealed inside new old stock tape eraser well it's got some weight to it this thing really has and it's got a nice wood grain case as well i expect what we're doing here is just passing a cassette between two quite substantial magnets you can see there's nowhere to to plug this into power there let's see what goes on here so oh look is that our serial number number 100 let's see what this does oh right so that opens and i think this is where you can settle slide down i'll read the instructions in a moment but i like playing around with stuff and it looks to be something that looks a bit like a cassette in there and it comes out of this side here [Applause] and as you can see there that's the micro cassette holder so if you had a sony micro cassette pop it in there so you can send it through the same device well we won't be using that of course place the cassette tape stopper into the real holes of the cassette so these are cassette tape stoppers the idea be you put it in like that and if you had snapped out your tabs on the top it wouldn't erase it i presume that's some kind of mechanical thing that stops it from moving through once it catches on one of these but as ours are intact we should have no problem with this so what we now have to do is take our cassette like this and run it through the machine pass the cassette through the eraser the other side lid will then be opened and both sides of the tape will be erased right well let's find out it's a weird thing listen to so i'm just passing it through there i feel like i'm getting irradiated or something but anyway there we go is that really erased like that is it that easy let's find out hardest bits getting those things in there i think i won't do that next time but here we go got the volume turned up right there's a weird kind of pulse on there but there's absolutely nothing on the tape as far as music goes the previous owner of these tapes had recorded them very low though i noticed they were barely even registering on the vus but uh that's much preferable over having audio on there that could then interrupt whatever you were recording let's try the other side it's got the same kind of pulse sound again so let's just demonstrate this again quickly so i'm going to pop a cassette here now right okay so let's just was that through here still on b side oh what am i doing put it the wrong way up that's it yeah there we go in out out the other side right pop it back in here play it's gone as easy as that so it's still got that kind of pulsing sound every now and then i wonder if i sent it through twice if that'll disappear because it might just be the position of the tape at the time you send it through so if we just throw it through there we go i'm gonna flip it over we're gonna do it again right that's not a few goes there pop it in here play and i still got the same sound but there's absolutely nothing on there now that's pretty impressive isn't it right well i've blanked two of those off already i mean that was really quick let's uh let's try one of these crow ones now chrome might be a little bit harder for it to erase just pop this in here fast forward it a little bit [Music] okay music on there so again let's send it through the magic box it's not letting it go through and i wonder if that's because it's a chrome tape and it can't erase chrome tapes because of course chrome's always going to have those notches on them like that the record tabs are still intact on here but what's happening is as i'm pushing this into here it's caption on the chrome tubs now there we go for erasing the chromium dioxide cassette which is equipped with extra holes the be9h is not recommended a commercially available taper razor with alternative current erasing method is recommended for erasing chromium dioxide cassettes or sony ferrochrome cassettes well that's that answered but let's just ignore it tape over these and send it through to see exactly what does happen all right so i'm just putting a bit of tape over the holes in the top so this can ride through the machine let's give that a go [Applause] right what is left on there now let's have a listen well i can't hear the music but it is really quite hissy now one thing i want to try if we stop there and i reset the counter i'll make sure there's nothing plugged into the input on here and then i set this to record we'll see if it sounds better after this record head has moved over the tape or if it's still as noisy so at the moment we're recording nothing we'll just do that for a few seconds so we can hear the join right let's just rewind that there okay so here's the hiss oh and it really goes quite a bit quieter than and then you better hear it come back up again there we go so that's the sony be9h and i really rate that i think that thing does an excellent job very simple very quick though and whilst it does leave a slightly noisy cassette afterwards of course once you've recorded over it again that sorts everything out so i could hear no remnants of the previous recordings on there at all i just got that white noise that kind of static sound so yeah i think that's great now people often say where do i get one of these from the answer is more when rather than where because when would be about 40 years ago aware is perhaps nowadays with any luck possibly ebay but uh i'm not gonna promise you that you better find one so that's that out of the way i think that's a good little thing let's move on to the next one now for this i'm gonna have to get my step down power transformer because it runs on 120 volts although it does say 50 60 hertz so fine with the cycles it's just the device itself needs the right voltage otherwise it'll burn it out so we've got copyright 1989 tandy corporation reel to real tapes audio cassettes computer diskettes eight track cartridges now this bulky razer does have a significant limitation that the previous device didn't in that it's only designed to be used for intermittent use it says here one minute on followed by 20 minutes off do not exceed this limitation erasing an entire tape takes only about 10 seconds so after erasing about six tapes you should let the unit cool off for about 20 minutes to prevent overheating and damage i suppose it's not such a big deal i mean if you can erase six tapes in what is effectively 20 minutes well that that's enough really isn't it i'm gonna say i'm not particularly comfortable with this thing i just don't exactly know what's going on because i mean it mentions do not use the magnetic bulky razor near delicate electronic equipment such as pacemakers or electronic watches well this whole room is full of stuff like that i can't imagine it travels all that far it's got a momentary switch on there so when you let go it stops and i'll just show you what's on the tapes so first one here okay and that's on a chrome tape and then this i'm going to use this tdk d90 [Music] i don't know i'm adjusting that volume it's coming out the speakers but you can see they both got something on them it looks like the chaperone these tdkd has improved his recording equipment by the time he got to these so let's turn on the step down and let's zap the chrome tape first of all because we weren't supposed to be able to do that with the previous device even though it did work so this is the first one that should be able to razor chrome tape officially let's just pop it in the middle there stick that on there zap it i mean what the hell's going on inside there okay well we'll assume that's that done here's another one [Applause] i mean is it supposed to sound like one of flash gordon's spaceships i don't know let's find out what's happened to those tapes i'll just turn that off so here's the crowball oh ah [Music] that's not great is it [Music] okay fading in and out now this might be how i'm using it i'm going to check the instructions again maybe i'm supposed to sort of move it up and down let's just have a listen to this one same with that one so it's it's erasing something but not all of it okay let's just move that to the back and see if i'm missing out what it's supposed to be doing whilst holding the button in the on position press the bottom of the eraser lightly on the cassette oh and move it in a circular motion across the entire surface of the media start in the middle of tape reels right so i got it wrong i wasn't doing it right okay but it shows it's working though kind of here we go again let's just pop that in the middle hold on i didn't realize it was that much look at that yeah i haven't i'm not putting me under this thing they can start off if they think i'm doing that [Music] yeah i'm sure everyone will be saying oh it's totally fine yeah um i don't trust you so i'll do it this way [Applause] okay right i think looks like hiding something surely that's enough though okay let us start with that chrome one i don't like using that at all not one little bit here we go i can still hear the music every now and then [Music] so it takes quite a bit of effort to do it properly i think this thing i think i did that one better i can't hear any music on this i can see how it could work but i mean it's a bit weird in it moving it around all the time only using it for a very short amount of time keeping all your stuff away from it i'm not a fan of this thing at all but there you go that's the radio shack bulk tape eraser and it is capable of erasing chrome tapes but you just need to do one at a time quite slowly and then let it rest for a while so perhaps not the the best thing in the world right so i've got a couple more tapes here and again just to demonstrate there's something on them i'll play them in this and we'll erase those in the sony b e a 200. so i'm going to start with this d 90 first i'm going to see how long this takes it's nearly at the beginning so we'll just rewind it back to the beginning first of all now i think what i should do run this off mains power it's just running off battery at the moment it uses the same voltage as the cassette recorder center neg as well so we'll just pop that in there now with this one we hold down this record button here or i should say raise button and you'll be able to see the the light come on there at the top so it's set to erase now so i'm just going to start it off and we'll see how long it takes to get through a full tape now these are 90 minute tapes so of course it would be a little bit quicker on a shorter one but you can see it's not exactly fast but then again that bulk tape eraser you know supposed to be able to do six in 20 minutes and it seems like i needed to spend a bit more time going over them than i was doing so six at most i would suggest so we'll see if this is able to get one of these cassettes done in about three minutes or under and if so that would be quicker than using the bulk tape eraser right so it's nearly reached the end now got my finger hovered over the stop right so that was just over three minutes so six threes 18 so effectively this is a little bit quicker than the bulk tape eraser even though it seems slow whilst it's happening but let's just see how well it's erased this 90 minute cassette now when i was listening to these before they sounded a bit bright and i assume that meant that previous owner recorded them with dolby b noise reduction activated and when you switch on they do sound a little bit better or they did when there was something on it let's just have a listen to it now i've just realized it only raises one side at a time that's it so it isn't quicker because it's not erasing the whole tape let's just rewind a little bit on here if i press play there should be nothing on this side yeah all right well this i mean i prefer using it to that bulk tape eraser but yeah it takes three minutes and a bit for each side of a 90 minute cassette but it does have its uses the other things of course just to raise the whole thing at once maybe you only want to raise one side of a cassette and it's very quiet that i can't hear anything on there yeah i mean that's like silent though and that has been erased by this magnet here which isn't a permanently raised magnet it's an electromagnet like you get in a normal cassette deck like this so it's run off power it runs off the double a batteries or the mains power that goes in the back of here and using an electromagnet it's raised that side of the tape so that's the kind of result you get if you erase a tape in this as well let's listen to what a tape sounds like we'll get another one of those d90s and instead we'll erase it in this portable stereo that i've got here and rather than an electromagnet this uses a permanent erase magnet in both these decks so you'll be able to do a comparison between what a tape sounds like when it's erased with an electromagnet or a permanent magnet and it should be quite a bit noisier with this thing so let's give it a go okay so we've got our other d90 here recorded by the previous owner presumably on the same device so it should be roughly the same as the other one [Music] i can't play much more than that but you can hear that that was queen and they've got the greatest hits recorded on here so what i'm going to do i'll rewind that back to the beginning again and i'm going to just record over it of course we'll be recording nothing on the top but what will be happening is that permanently raised magnet will be preparing the cassette ready for something to be recorded which isn't actually getting put on the tape so then we'll be able to hear how much hiss that leaves behind so here we go ah hold on i think they've got the right protect notch took out yeah i'll just have to tape that up right sorry queen but you've got to go i think this one only wants to record where the second one's working all right we'll move into the second one instead then let's just record on this one instead yeah there we go right so we're currently recording nothing onto there whatsoever and then what i'm going to do i'll play it back in this one again like we did before and we'll hear how much hiss is on the tape now okay so we've erased some tapes it'll be silly not to try recording on them to see how well they sound after all these years and we're going to record some audio from the youtube audio library and it's going to be this track here so once i've recorded that across i'll play them both back to you one after the other so when you're looking at them being played on the screen you're hearing the audio that i've just recorded onto each tape do do [Music] so [Music] okay well what have i learned from today's escapades well the first thing is i would suggest i shouldn't have been concerned about reusing old cassettes now i never re-recorded of my own because i didn't need to but in this modern day and age when you can't really get decent new tapes and sealed old ones or cost a fortune then the only real way to get hold of a load of cassettes at a reasonable price is to buy somebody's old collection of recordings and you'll find quite a lot of these advertised on ebay it's usually when there's like a house clearance or something someone will find a big box of old cassettes that someone recorded in the 80s and 90s and they stick them on ebay and you can get them at a reasonable price and then of course it's down to you to raise them and re-record over them if you want to and it seems like the best way to go as far as i can see i mean they've got tapes here from perhaps 1979 1980 that kind of age and the recordings weren't difficult to shift at all i didn't notice any kind of remnants of the previous recordings once i recorded something new on them the recording there sounded as good as if i recorded it ordered you take from that era so i've got no issues there at all and it does seem to be the most economic way to go if you do plan on making quite a few recordings nowadays and you want to do them at a reasonable quality now when it comes to erasing those ones if you're just doing it in your normal tape deck and you're just recording over the tape well no issues whatsoever if you wanted to do some kind of bulk operation well if you've got type 1 tapes which i've got a box of 80 odd well less than that now 70 odd of them there i'm probably just going to run them all through this thing this be9h and no you can't buy these anymore but if you could it's a pretty cool thing because you just whizz it through takes like a second for each cassette and there's no remnants of the previous recording on there you get a bit of noise but of course then it doesn't matter when you record over it that gets erased as long as you're using a cassette deck which has a decent um electromagnetic erase head so yeah i thought that was a good thing really quick and easy takes no power dead simple and then of course i've got my little rewinder slash eraser which is great for doing them at a quicker rate than your normal cassette deck would and of course it's a proper electromagnet head in that as well but of course again you can't get those one thing i wouldn't recommend not a fan of this i just don't like it there's something creeps me out about the whole idea but really you want like a big powerful one if you're going to do a load of tapes quickly and there are like commercial ones where there's like a plate and you stick your tapes on it and you can do hundreds and hundreds of them so if you were doing like a more uh bulk operation well this doesn't really suit that it takes too long for each one it can only do a few at a time so i wouldn't recommend looking for one of those but yeah the overall moral of this is if you want to get some good tapes nowadays your best buys are probably somebody else's old unwanted cassettes and that's it for the moment as always thanks for watching okay i'd just like to return to this bulk tape eraser for a second because since shooting that earlier section i've been reliably informed that these are not devices to be feared there's nothing dangerous going on in that buzzing sound this was emanating is completely normal in fact when people used to use these back in the day they'd hold a cassette in one hand like this and they'd pass the device over it for quite a few seconds longer than i was doing and they had no problems with them at all i don't plan on using this again so i think it'd be nice to crack it open and see exactly what's going on inside here there are no screws on it so i think we just need to try and lever the case apart if it's all possible okay so that's what's inside this bulk tape eraser just a big old electro magnet and because of the way the poles are arranged you need to make sure you properly sweep all over the cassette for quite a few seconds to get rid of any audio on there and i've been told by people that use these they were told to leave them switched on as they gradually withdrew them from the cassette to avoid leaving behind any artifacts so now you know that's what's inside a bulk tape eraser or at least this one you

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 441,589

Keywords: Techmoan, 4K, cassettes, tapes, bulk erase, erasing, magnets, permanent erase, tape erasing, bulk tape erasing, tape, audio tape, quick erase

Id: 2_Gh4Fu7_G8

Length: 36min 41sec (2201 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 27 2022